At the current minimum wage, an earner working full-time for the full year still does not escape poverty.

Structural Poverty in Ontario

In the last 35 years, except for a short period in the mid- 1980s to 1991, the poverty rate in Ontario has hovered between 9% to just over 12%, using the Ontario Government’s official poverty measure (Low Income Measure – After Tax) and the latest Statistics Canada low income figures.

Whether in good or bad economic times, since the recession of 1992, Ontario has struggled to stay below a double-digit poverty rate of 10% or higher.

This tells us that reducing the poverty rate to 4% or lower will require structural approaches that address the basic material living conditions of low income Ontarians.

Further, the worrying trend is the upward slope of the Ontario poverty rate when tracked by decade since the beginning of the 1990s.